Oklahoma public schools have weathered significant challenges to keeping student numbers up. The coronavirus pandemic. Private school vouchers. Shifting demographics.
Districts such as Tuskahoma are working to counteract those headwinds. Expansion of the state's open transfer law spurred Superintendent Jonathan Freeman to add more activities to engage students.
"We're so rural, there's just not a lot here," Freeman said.
The school started a dance team and added music lessons, fishing, e-sports and an aviation program. They created an after-school program and opened a daycare for 1- to 2-year-olds, responding to the needs of families.
Tuskahoma, a dependent district with no high school, grew from 65 students in the fall of 2023 to 89 last fall, to 108 students by the end of the year.
Similarly, Norman Public Schools drew families with a standalone aviation and aerospace academy for high school students. And to attract and retain teachers, the district will launch a childcare program for employees. The suburban school district reported more than 16,000 students this year, 361 more than last year.
Both districts celebrated growth in student enrollment this year, while the student population across the state held nearly flat.
There were 697,358 students counted on Oct. 1, 2024, according to the Oklahoma Department of Education. That's down 0.25% from 2023, and 0.9% lower than the all-time high of 703,650 set in 2019, before Covid-19 disruptions.
Oklahoma subsidized private school tuition for more than 27,000 students in 2024, the first year of the Parental Choice Tax Credit. But there were only 1,744 fewer students enrolled in public schools that fall.
Nationally, public school enrollment is predicted to drop by 2.1 million students between 2020 and 2030, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Enrollment in private schools is also projected to decline by 1.2 million students during the same time frame.
That is mainly due to a slow demographic decline in the school-age population but accelerated by the pandemic, which drove many families to choose different types of schooling, said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University, who has studied the post-pandemic dip in school enrollment.
Covid brought on a sustained rise in homeschooling and private schooling in states Dee studied, but some states, such as Oklahoma, don't collect or report that data.
"The pandemic really exposed the inadequacies of data systems," he said, adding that in some states, even basic metrics like where students are enrolled or if they are attending has been lacking.
Oklahoma Watch, at oklahomawatch.org, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that covers public-policy issues facing the state.
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